Bob Dole’s Delinquent Children

How the GOP's old guard led to generation Gingrich—and what comes next.

It was difficult to watch Bob Dole on “Fox News Sunday.” Despite his longtime reputation as a crotchety old man, the veteran Kansas senator once defied his age like a Republican Dick Clark. In nearly a dozen years leading Senate Republicans, including two stints as majority leader, he kept a pace that would have tired much younger men.

Dole received this writer’s first vote for president. It is so far my only ballot cast for a Republican presidential nominee without reluctance or regret. This was the era of the dawning Internet boom, when the Iraq War was still a gleam in Bill Kristol’s eye.

Now frail and confined to a wheelchair, Dole is disfigured as much by age and illness as injuries sustained in battle during World War II. Even his familiar voice seems a bit muted, his delivery suddenly slow and halting.

But the nearly 90-year-old Republican elder statesman still flashed his trademark mordant wit, especially when assessing his party. “I think they ought to put a sign on the national committee doors that says ‘closed for repairs’ until New Year’s Day next year and spend that time going over ideas and positive agendas,” Dole cracked.

Dole—who once chaired that national committee at Richard Nixon’s request—wasn’t much kinder to President Obama, whom he dismissed as a “greater golfer” who failed to engage even the Democratic leadership early enough. Naturally, his criticisms of the GOP received more attention.

The man who appeared on two national Republican tickets in 20 years said he doubted he could get very far within the party today. “Reagan couldn’t have made it,” Dole added. “Certainly Nixon could not have made it because he had ideas. We might have made it, but I doubt it.”

This has become a common refrain among a certain kind of Republican. Jeb Bush said much the same thing, throwing his father into the mix of party elders who would be out of step with today’s GOP.

Dole’s legislative accomplishments ranged from being part of the bipartisan majorities that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to playing a key role in the passage of the Reagan economic program. The Republicans of his era were more temperamentally conservative, even if less ideologically so. They believed in balanced budgets and would have been horrified to hear a party leader say “deficits don’t matter.”

Newt Gingrich, who became Dole’s partner in crime during the GOP Congress of 1995-96, is a good example of the party’s evolved brand. He led Republicans to their first House majority in 40 years, displaying a creativity that past Republican leaders conspicuously lacked. But he was undone by his excesses, cultivating an image of partisanship, over-the-top statements, and a penchant for unpopular crusades.

Today’s GOP is as much Gingrich’s party as Reagan’s or Nixon’s. Chest-beating often replaces prudence, the party frequently makes use of both libertarian and traditionalist themes without taking either of them very seriously.

Yet the party of Bob Dole had its flaws as well. Its fixation on accounting didn’t stop the federal government from getting bigger. Its identity as the party that paid for Democratic spending or aped the same programs on the cheap doomed it to permanent minority status. Its supposed affinity for ideas was marked by indifference to whether those ideas were Nixon’s wage and price controls or Reagan’s deregulation.

Much as the Greatest Generation gave way to the Baby Boomers, the Gingrich Republicans are the frustrated children of the Dole Republicans. Not content to be good losers or to play low-budget liberals, they went for broke. Gingrich was in many respects right to criticize Dole for being the “tax collector of the welfare state.” It was bad policy and worse politics, though it added up better than war and welfare with nobody paying the bill.

Nevertheless, the Baby Boomers always get their way. In his final presidential campaign, ahead of a competitive Arizona primary, Dole lamented with Barry Goldwater that they were now the liberals in the Republican Party. “I’m willing to be another Ronald Reagan if that’s what you want me to be,” Dole would also tell Republicans.

Perhaps the Gingrich Republicans’ progeny will give us a real limited-government party, one that endeavors to keep both taxes and spending as low as possible. It’s an ambitious dream, but no more so than hoping to turn Doles into Reagans.

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53 Responses to Bob Dole’s Delinquent Children

I have two beefs to pick with Mr. Antle. First is his characterizing Dole’s generation as the Greatest Generation. That comes from Tom Brokaw’s ignorant book. The real, (tongue in cheek!) authoritative source is Wikipedia which says that the members of the Greatest Generation were those born between 1900 and 1924–which, admittedly Dole scrapes through but does not imply that his brand of Republican, most of whom were born after that date, is anything great. Those born between 1924 and 1945 are, according to Wikipedia, called (rightly) the Silent Generation. All historical datelines are fuzzy. I personally think those born between 1890 and 1910 are the true greatest generation. They really lived through the depression, as adults, not children. They, like my Uncle Stu, often fought in both WWI and WWII and didn’t expect any adulation or benefits like the generation that followed them and which Bob Dole was more than willing to accomodate. My second beef is also generational, and usually comes from those who follow the Baby Boomers who are looking for someone to blame for their less than hopeful future. To whom I say, get your facts straight! Boomers were pretty loused up, I agree (I’m born in 1951). But the rot set in well before. One quick example, who was in charge of, say, Ford when it produced some of the worst junk in its corporate history (whcih was to those of us old enough to remember was probably the middle-late 70’s)? Not the Boomers, to be sure, but the Silent Generation–to use Wikipedia’s categories. And to return to Saint Dole, Gingrich was truely right that he was the tax collector for the Welfare State. If my memory serves me, Gingrich also said he was the midwife for the same welfare state–again, it was not the Boomers who created it but we, like the generation which followed us are also its victims.

Since no one else has answered, I’ll take a stab. First of all, thanks for your service.

It saddens me greatly, but it seems that the current policy of the chickenhawks is to start wars for private profit & socialize the costs to the taxpayer & future generations. Additionally, we turn our backs on the men & women who risk everything to fight for the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower so aptly warned us would own us. And they do.

But it’s not just our soldiers & veterans we shaft. It’s our children too. The GOP mantra seems to be “I got mine, screw you…”. Would that we would see the value of keeping education affordable, so that the rest of the world doesn’t outsmart us. But college often teaches people to think for themselves, making them worse sheep. And the extremists in both parties need people who won’t question, research & think for themselves.

Now that the interest rates on student loans are exponentially higher than the rates for big banks & businesses, getting a higher education will be even harder. I am so sorry for you & all the other young people of this nation.

Overpraise of a justly forgotten quasi-hero. Dole was a fundamentally mercurial and Nixonian figure with grudges. His opining about “Democrat wars” mischaracterizes the abherration called Vietnam, which was the product of over-budgeting and overreach of Kennedy generation Cold Warriors who simply equated Keynsianism with guns and butter all at once. So where was his vision of prudent war power then? Or his understanding of WWII?

He later became the scion against “nation-building” under Clinton.Little did he realize that when you are picking up the pieces of failed states, dealing with little things like genocide, and anticipating the reemergence of bad correlations of power, nation-building is inevitably what you resort to.

The idea that Dole should have been the Old War Horse to run against Clinton was as absurd as having had Romney or McCain. In life he was a vengeful schemer who unceremoniously dumped his first wife for high-powered Libby, and apparently made one of his campaign managers take the fall for illegal campaign expenditures.

Although he is listed as a war hero, his first choice was draft deferral in an attempt to gain admittance to medical school. No Bush ’41 is he.

Whether passive aggressively (Reagan’s tax cuts were a “riverboat gamble”) or more openly (insulting Cruz), Dole’s utterances were less expressions of taciturn Midwestern demeanor, than expressions of a hurtful personality.